Re: Font for PC graphics characters
Thus spake Jan Willem Stumpel on Wed, May 10, 2006 at 05:06:20PM +0200 or thereabouts: <jstumpel@planet.nl> [2006-05-10 13:36]:
> cga2000 wrote:
>
> > is there a howto (of sorts) anywhere?
>
> Not AFAIK. But xterm basically understands ansi sequences, so it
> should not be difficult to write a filter that would produce the
> picture by means of
>
> cat xxxx.ans |filter
>
> You could use either
>
> -- the special xterm mode which displays box characters
> (something like ESC(O , or something similar, forgot what it
> is).
yes, you're right.. and ESC(B to return to regular display mode..
> or
>
> -- a utf-8 capable xterm
>
that's precisely what I am running..
> The problem is that not only ansi sequences (for colours and
> cursor position) must be interpreted. xterm does this by default.
> But also the characters themselves must be translated from PC-DOS
> ("codepage 437") to the characters understood by your xterm
> (iso-8859-1 or utf-8).
>
> As a quick test, I tried some of the ansi art examples in
> http://www.acid.org/ftp/aaa-8991.zip on my utf-8 capable xterm,
> simply using iconv to convert codepage 437 to utf-8, e.g.:
>
> iconv -f 437 -t utf-8 tohs.ans
>
not bad at all with the font I normally use (terminus-12)
I tried smaller fonts but they don't seem to have all the box drawing
characters - in any case the results were not quite as good as with
terminus-12.
> I suppose that if you have a legacy xterm with iso-8859-1
> (unfortunately still the default in Debian) it would have to be
don't tell me.. I run debian sarge (stable) and try as I may I was never
able to install from source the "debian way". So I had to go through a
lot of contortions to install not just xterm but also recent versions of
screen, elinks, etc. without breaking my system.. hopefully..
>
> iconv -f 437 -t iso-8859-1 tohs.ans
>
> This gives some idea of what it should look like. It becomes better
> when you select reverse video (control-middle click, then select
> reverse video). But getting the true glory of ansi art, including the
> proper colour scheme, would require a specially-written filter, I
> think.
I ran it on a 256-color xterm.. not sure whether that helps, though..
>
> The easiest is to just use the TYPE command in an ms-dos environment
> (dosemu) with ansi.sys.
.. easiest for someone that has a degree of familiarity with dos. I'm
sure installing dosemu is no big deal on a debian box.. presumably a
simple apt-get install would do it.. but then, I would have to
initialize some form of dos file system.. import the .ans files.. not
easy when you have zero experience with dos.. :-)
>
> Regards, Jan
Thanks much.
cga
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